🎄 🎄 Merry Christmas everyone! 🎄 🎄

Image from Semiautomatic — a short story based on Star Crossed, our entry for LD47.

Hello everyone! Just wanted to let you know that my latest Ludum Dare Post Mortem will premiere today in ~hours on YouTube, so if you happen to see this, please drop by and enjoy the show! 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7E9xi64NJI

And here's the poster

Hi guys. I've made a simple game during LD40 and I loved the result. It is a game about refugees inspired by true stories, including my grandfather's.

So, I've decided to turn the LD40 prototype into a full published game on Steam. I'm feeling very happy now and I think that will honor their memories and their struggle.

Take a time to view the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi9YmXuKMBM

I used to use this https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/dungeon-buddies/check-out-your-old-ludum-dare-entries

but looks like it doesn't work anymore. Does anyone know if it's possible to retrieve my old games? Teenage-croze wasn't very smart about keeping projects in one place.

Hello everyone.

When we made our game for LD49 we received a good amount of interesting feedback. We saw players being stressed out by it but also having a lot of fun. Some were swearing during the peak moments of the playthrough and some were sweating after completing it. We saw wild mixture of emotions from those who played so we decided to keep making it and see what's going to come out of it.

We made a story campaign with 10 levels, tripled the amount of interactable panels, added a bunch of gameplay mechanics, like panel being set on fire or colleagues that distract you from your work. Spiced it up with funny and over-the-top dialogue and characters. Right now we are working on hidden secrets that you can discover while playing by interacting with a room.

In a nutshell, we want to combine fun, stress and satisfaction from overcoming stress.

Recently we made our Steam page and plan to release in March.

Here's our trailer and thank you for reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10IxYS_7oE

Those of you who played the smash hit Star Crossed (1,548th overall) during LD47 may remember the short story introducing the game. That story recently inspired another project, a picture book titled "Edge Detection." See it here:

-----------> Edge Detection <-----------

I just want you to meet the new additions to Clay Boy

Twitter

My LD48 game, the Reverse of the Summit, has now been uploaded to itch.io with new features! The Reverse of the Summit is an twitchy endless runner game about skiing down a cave. Now featuring a shop to buy custom skins, and an online leaderboard! Download for Windows here!

Hello again everyone! We're still working on our Ludum Dare 48 entry. We're hoping to launch it this year and we're super excited about. This is our second commercial game which means we've learned a lot and are excited to use that knowledge for a more successful launch. If you're interested you can check it out here : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1626280/Explory_Story/

I am proud to announce that my Ludum Dare 48 game Duggy will come to switch very soon.

It is now on pre-sale here: US : https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/duggy-switch/

EU : https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Duggy-2166152.html

After the Ludum Dare and after many monthes i decided to improve the gameplay and make a fully arcade game with more levels and increase the difficult.

Also you can collect lives when you reach specific amount of score.

To be honest: this might not be my greatest game but what was important ist to put the name from my son (who had this idea for this game) in the titel screen (which is btw. important for every developer to put).

Hope you have fun playing it.

Skew Pong's Jam Version

During the last Ludum Dare (49, theme : Unstable), I've made Skew Pong, adding instability to the classic Pong gameplay through a 3d game area that would be unstable and turn around on 2 different axis depending of the player's actions as well as the ball's movement. The game was playable either in local multiplayer (gamepads or same keyboard) or solo against AI.

The game was well received and my best result in a LD so far (139th Overall in Jam). With its well-defined small scope, it was also a perfect game to go with for a first try at a commercial release over the course of a few months. So, I decided to continue it after the LD results were out, and started working up towards a release.

The path towards release

I spent 3 months and a half, since late October until now, working on the game on my free time though I couldn't dedicate as much time as I'd have liked to it at some points (uni, exams, part-time job, moving out, organizing global game jam, etc... had quite a lot of stuff happening in my personal life those last few months). I also had to learn and deal with administrative stuff as a commercial release means you need to do the legal stuff like registering a business and all.

One of the first things I did was to rewrite some parts of the game, as code made in jams is often not very clean and not exactly made with upgradability or maintainability in mind due to the time constraints, as well as bugs being quite frequent in jam games. One of those parts I spent the most work on was my Menu&Buttons system to make it modulable & easily extendable (and it got extended quite a lot afterwards to answer the UI needs). I also worked on some new systems for stuff like Settings or Localization, which aren't things you focus on doing properly during a jam but are really important for a full release.

Next was improving the gameplay, adding in more content and improving replayability. I didn't want to touch too much at the base concept nor derive from it, and so chose the path of adding different game modes that would play with different parameters with a lot more fine-tuning than the jam version. The jam version only had a simple Instability setting (ranging from none to extreme) which would allow the board to move more or less. Instead, I separated it in multiple parts, so each axis' instability could be toyed with independently, as well as making more things modifiable like gravity, the camera's perspective (can be 3d or '2d') as well as more classic stuff like paddles' size or ball's speed. This, allows to explore the different possibilities that can be done with the base mechanics and propose different game modes to the player ranging from classic pong to an extreme mode (+ players can also access the parameters and toy with them to play custom modes).

Another important part was improving the game feel, which would go through balancing the game and polishing the game, adding in more juice. Balance is kind of an hard issue, especially when you've got rather unique mechanics to deal with. Fine-tuning the default 'Skew' mode was quite hard, and it took a lot of iterations, ending up with a balance very different from the jam's one (more dynamic/fast-paced, while trying to keep it beginner-friendly). Another side to balance was AI. The jam's AI was simply too good as with Pong being a rather simple game, making an unbeatable AI is very easy (just calculate where the ball will go, go there and done) while doing an AI that feels human and makes errors takes a lot of work. So, I iterated quite a lot on making the AI less reactive/more prone to errors and implemented different AI difficulties.
As for adding more juice to the game, it went through adding more feedback like coloring parts of the wall when a player is pushing the arena around, improving the core gameplay loop and doing a lot of work on the UI & Menus, etc...

After the release / What now ?

First, I'm planning to continue working a bit on Skew Pong in the coming weeks, as there's still a few things I think could be improved and that I want to add. There also might be some issues/bug encountered by the players that I'll have to fix.

After that, I don't know what I'll be working on next yet. I'm planning to take part in LD50 in April of course, and who knows, maybe it will give birth to my 2nd commercial game.

You can check out Skew Pong on Steam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPdqruL4oyg

Hey everyone,

My name is Harry White, and I'm the founder of Geta Games Team (https://getagamesteam.itch.io/), who, in particular, created this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144850/MANIC/

I'm planning on doing a game jam every weekend, and for each one I'm going to work with a different artist.

All of the games will 2D, and either made in "GameMaker: Studio 2" or with the "MonoGame / XNA Framework"

If you're interested in working with me, just let me know in the comments!! :)

Anyone aware of a relatively recent list of official scrabble words in text/csv/json format? Having trouble finding something that looks credible. Doesn't have to be scrabble related, just a list of most English words.

Those of you who played the smash hit Star Crossed (1,548th overall) during Ludum Dare 47 may remember the short story introducing the game. An image from that story (copied below) inspired another project, a picture book titled “Sorrow, Hope, Hunger.” In addition to Star Crossed it’s based on an old Russian folk tale about a princess and her wicked stepmother. Read it here:

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

                                                                               Sorrow, Hope, Hunger                                                                                

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

The first two stories inspired by Star Crossed were Semiautomatic and Edge Detection. “Sorrow, Hope, Hunger” is also the title of an unrelated game made for practice for LD48.

Hello fellow jammers! We put an early Demo of Dome Romantik on Steam, based on our Ludum Dare 48 entry. It's much expanded and polished from the jam version :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Romantik/

If you had fun with the original jam game or missed it completely, check it out :)

Edit: We are no longer looking for music, 3D or sound artists.

Our team is looking for experienced 2D artists for the upcoming Ludum Dare jam to make concept art and, if possible, textures. Currently, our roster consists of 3-5 Unity developers with varied levels of experience, 1 experienced 3D artist, a beginner-intermediate 3D artist, and a musician.

Some of us are fairly versatile and can help with different aspects of the game, but we would love to have more focused talent in these areas so we can create something really awesome.

Please check out my page to see our previous entries.

If you have questions or if you are interested in joining, please post where we can find your work and how you can be contacted on Discord.

Thank you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLpyiJQB7bo

In april 2020, I completed my LDJam 45 entry "The Totally Convenient Feeding Machine".

The comments and feedback received here gave me the strength to take some time to expand the concept into a full game. Today, I'm releasing it on Steam!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-98CpRQIk-w

I wanted to thank the awesome Ludum Dare community for their support, honest feedbacks and kind words. I also wanted to say to inexperienced game devs that it is possible and that you can do it too!

Please, give the demo a try and drop the game a wishlist :) Totally Convenient On Steam

See you in April! Jonathan Lorenz

One of the ways I like to “start early” on these jams is by brainstorming over all the possible themes. Sometimes, I can find ideas that will fit multiple themes. Here’s what I’m coming up with so far:

Road trip - Obvious choice is to make a game about driving a car down the road. Too basic - Maybe a resource management game. You have to handle handing out snacks/drink, decide how much food/gas to buy at each stop, decide if you want to waste time stopping or risk the kids having an “accident” - Alternate interpretation: making people literally trip in the road. Cheating in a race? Setting Wile E. Coyote style traps? - Driving while on drugs? Idk. - A “where in the USA is Carmen San Diego” type game, where you’re tracking someone cross county and need to investigate to find out what their next path is.

Folklore - Basically any folklore tail. A game about Leprechauns comes to mind. Just type __ folklore for any culture for ideas. - Game about scary campfire stories. Bloody Mary, etc. - Game about video game related legends, like the Atari ET landfill, or trying to steal a prototype for a cancelled Sega console - Lower down I mentioned an idea for “mirror” that involved Medusa, that could work here too.

Out of order - Trying to get a snack from a broken vending machine without breaking it - Stranded in the wilderness, you need to repair a radio or vehicle to return to civilization - You’re a broken robot that has to find replacement parts for yourself - In a car with cut breaks

Echoes - Something regarding sonar. Submarine? Bats? - A game where you have to carry a duck up a mountain to prove it’s quack does/does not have an echo - A paranormal investigator who can hear ‘echos’ caused by residual haunting

Infestation - Puzzle game, Dr Mario style, but where you’re fighting pest instead of viruses - A game were you are a pest, seeking food for the rest of your colony/next - A game where you control small nano-bots that “infest” an enemies base/ship

Become the enemy - A game about being a double agent - A game where you’re a henchman trying to overthrow your supervillain boss - Zombies, vampires, werewolves, any antagonist that can literally turn you into them - Stealth game where you’re master of disguise or shapeshifter

Read the manual - A game that literally has a PDF you have to read, if only because it has copy protection - You find alien technology but the manual is written in their language, you need to translate it. Maybe a puzzle game. - You find a coded distress message written in a users manual, decipher it to liberate a slave game developer

Shelter - Shelter yourself with a shield from falling objects, use it to bash enemies that run at you from the side - trapped in the wilderness, you need to find/build shelter before freezing - the pest game from “infestation”, but with an added mechanic of hiding areas from cat or exterminator

Outnumbered - Simple action game where baddies constantly come at you - A competition to solve math questions quickly against an opponent. - a “Risk” style board game where numbers of units in a specific battle can affect odds

One tool, many purposes - platformer where a tool (ie a hammer) is used to break/fix things but also a weapon - the shield game in “shelter” could work here. Maybe the shield is also a sled when you stand on it

Clockwork - The “broken robot” idea for “out of order” might work here too - find the correct missing part in a machine to return functionality - platform inside giant machine, need to walk along gears, etc

Make connections - The double agent idea from “Become the enemy” could work, “connections” as in assets you’re investigating - Running around facility connecting wires to restore power - A game about finding/providing cell phone coverage in a spotty area - A game where you’re cupid, have to shoot the right people when they’re close to their soulmate, so people aren’t falling in love with the wrong person

Parasite - A game about being a mosquito - A stealth game about stealing coworkers food from fridge

Different every time - A game with randomly generated anything

Garden - the pest game in “infestation” could work, but your grabbing food from a garden - Plants vs zombies type?f - Gardenscapes type puzzle game?

Mirror - a fast-paced games where an enemy ‘hacker’ will invert your vertical and/or horizontal controls every few seconds. - a game involving vampires, and how mirrors expose them - a game where you’re hunting Medusa. You can look at her reflection but not her directly.

Out of bounds - A sports game with boundaries. Dodgeball, maybe. - Building off that, Sumo wrestling, or another game where you can win by forcing your enemy out of an area. - A game where the level gets smaller and smaller

I’m really digging “Folklore”, as it’s incredibly open but can still have a variety of stories we know, we’ve never heard before, or we’re hearing with a new twist.

Something tells me this Ludum Dare is going to be bigger and badder than any other jam so far. It's the 50th! Prepare yourself for a very long and productive weekend. If you aren't working every hour of every day, you aren't doing it right. ;) Looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!

https://www.twitch.tv/ambear1337 https://www.twitch.tv/ambear1337 https://www.twitch.tv/ambear1337

Nothing like a nice 8 hours of sleep to drain the self loathing from your brain. Remember friends if you feel like everything your making is bad and your a bad person for making such garbage. It could be true, OR you could have just forgot to eat and have been awake for 20 hours.

So, LD50, I'm here once again :D This time with Godot, as I continue my exploration of game-making technologies. As of now, I must say, Godot is an awesome tool. I've managed to code most of mechanics in my game, which will be sort of a clicker/city simulator with pooping dinos. The visual form is yet 100% full of placeholders, but that will be changed tomorrow. But so far so good.

This game is a classic case of overscope on my part haha, several things that I originally wanted to add had to be cut from the finished game to make at least something that is playable in time. For Ludum Dare 49, I had made something much more simple, so I wanted to see if I can 'reach higher' for this one.. man, was I wrong. I was already going out of my comfort zone by going for a visual novel style game, but also drawing inspiration from Heavy Rain and Detroit Become Human, I also wanted to incorporate quick-action game play where you had to press the key that appears on the screen in time. Making the base game/story ended up eating a lot more of my time than I had anticipated.

The game itself was a much more artistic take on the theme rather than being mechanics based, which is something I was not used to. Even though I overscoped very hard and I feel that I could have done things much better in hindsight, this was a great learning experience for me and overall was very fun, which I think is what matters the most.

Check it out here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/smog

Is there a simple to do that? Because this was pretty awkward to create:

Unity Recorder → Image Sequence (PNG, no alpha channel) → Online Tool (ezgif)

My team and I will be playing YOUR games live on stream again today starting around 3:20 EST. Come join us in Twitch Chat and don't forget to submit your game if you haven't already! Today is the last day submissions will be open, so we can make sure we play every game live before time is up!

We still prioritize games that have Devs in chat for the feedback, but we also highlight every game separately, in case you can't be there or just want a copy of the footage for later. We hope to see you there!

last time i concentrated a lot on the look of the game and so the gameplay kinda suffered a bit. Learned a lot this year and want to take a new approach on this one. did not prepared my project in advance. just want to go head in when the timer hits 0 :) feels good to be back . good luck to every one

• Program : Unity
• Art : PyxelEdit
• Sound : Geist

What can you do in 10 seconds?

First off,

I wanted to thank everyone for playing, rating, and commenting on my game! This community is what makes this game jam the best on the Internet!

My game has received quite a bit of engagement, and I want to pay it back to the developers who are still in the Danger zone. Everyone deserves a rating!

Do you have a Danger Zone Game?

I will be playing and rating Danger Zone games until the Rating Period Ends. Leave your games in the comments below!

Does Ludum Dare still support uploading and embedding your game on you game page? In the Embedding Guid it says

"Files are uploaded from your game page. Simply edit them (click the pencil icon the bottom corner), scrolling to the 'Downloads' section, and click the upload button"

There doesn't seem to be an upload button in the Downloads section and I'm wondering if the functionality was removed.

Not a huge fan of the themes this time around, but I'm still excited to see which one wins. I'm surprised that folklore didn't make it to the final round.

This theme is gonna be a hard one so good luck to everyone! Personally I'm glad the theme wasn't "Your health bar is more that just a health bar" or "Every input does two things" :sweat_smile:

Are we allowed to use premade fonts in the compo or do we have to make those ourselves too?

It was pretty close but I managed to finish!

This was my first 3D game for a game jam so it's pretty bad, but I'm happy with the result. Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/satellite-delivery

Still Trying to Get The Web Build to Work

nothing to see here! did you know the LDjam site has no way to delete posts lol

This was the first time I was able to finally submit something in time for the Jam format! My schedule got very busy after the jam was over, so I haven't had much time to play and rate some others yet, but I'll finally be able to start that now!

Check out my procedurally generated dungeon crawler * Labyrinth of Fiends! *

Playable in browser!

Its a simple dungeon crawler. Kill fiends, collect their souls to summon your own, find the key and make your way to the next floor!

I had to reduce the scope dramatically from my initial ideas, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Unfortunately, I spent so much time focusing on fixing bugs that I didn't have time to do any sfx or music before the deadline, but I'll be working on some updates for the post-jam version over the next week or so.

Check it out here!

Hoping to participate, Have completed my slaughter - I am pretty damn ruthless.

We're really thankful for the feedback that we've received about our game from the community and really appreciate all of the kind comments and support! We've got plenty of plans for a full release, and we've only increased the list with everything we've heard from YOU!

If you haven't tried out Miku's Minion Madness yet, you can try check it out here, on your browser!

For the past week, we've also been checking out the different jam games out there! Here's some of our favorites so far:

Tiny Checkers

Fish Fighter

Need For Snail:midnight

Ant Samurai

Springtail

There's a lot more wonderful creations to play, so if you'd like us to play your game, let us know in the comments!

First time that I join in time for the suggestions so I was struggling with theme ideas, most of them were too straight-forward or too attached to game mechanics. After reading a bunch of other people's suggestions I came up with these:

In our game Hex to the Max you summon creatures by placing hexagons on a grid, going for big numbers and chaining sick combos.

We settled on bugs, the unholy and robots as themes more or less randomly based on discarded game ideas. Only afterwards did I realise:

Hexapods

Hexes

Hexcode (okay, this one is for colors - hello, artist here :wave: - but still!)

For this Ludum Dare, we made a rhythm game that's heavily inspired by Crypt of the Necrodancer. It was quite a journey to figure out how to make everything follow the rhythm. But now, almost a week after the end of the jam and after fixing some nasty bugs, I finally feel like I understand what I was actually doing last weekend, and I want to share what I've learned in this little "How to Make a Rhythm Game".

Get the beat

I'm a programmer, not a musician, so I can't tell you how to make a beat, only how to get the beat into the game. Ask your favourite musician to give you a file with the time of every beat in the song (along with the song itself). One way to get file like that is to export the "beat" track as MIDI and then convert it to a JSON file using one of the many free online converters. Then you can load this file into your game engine. The beat of our first song is 90bpm and has a simple 4/4 rhythm, it looks like this in the code: beat_array[0]=0 beat_array[1]=0.67 beat_array[2]=1.33 beat_array[3]=2 beat_array[4]=2.67 beat_array[5]=3.33 beat_array[6]=4 This approach lets you be super flexible with any beat your musician throws at you. Even if they make some weird polyrhythmic noise, you could easily import it into the game (playing that would be a whole different story though). Here's an example of the slightly more complex beat of our second song: beat_array[0]=0 beat_array[1]=0.67 beat_array[2]=1.33 beat_array[3]=2 beat_array[4]=2.33 beat_array[5]=2.67 beat_array[6]=3.33 In the code, you can then compare the current position in the song with the beat array to see if a beat has occured and how long it is before the next one. beat beat -----0.67s--------------------1.33s----- | | | |

Move to the beat

In our rhythm game, the player has to give input to the rhythm of the beat. If they manage to hit a beat, they'll move in a direction, but if they don't, they'll lose health. The issue here is, what exactly does it mean to "hit" a beat?

The player will never input at exactly the same time as the beat because they're an imprecise human and the game logic runs in frames, so it'll never detect the beat at exactly the right time. So, you need some kind of buffer time that allows for delayed input:

beat beat -----0.67s--------------------1.33s----- | | | | ------+------ ------+------ input allowed input allowed | | | | The key thing to consider is that this buffer time has to be applied in both directions. The player might hit a key slightly after or before a beat happens. To take this into account, we do the following each time the player gives input: - check if the time difference to the previous or next beat is smaller than the buffer time - if yes, check if the beat has already been hit - if not, mark the beat as hit - move the player

Now the player can move to the beat, and with the buffer time you also have an easy tool to scale difficulty.

Get hit by the beat

The next thing to do is to get the environment, or enemies, to move to the beat as well, and make them damage the player if they collide. Movement is pretty straightforward: every time a beat occurs, all enemies move. The nice thing about this is that now the whole world can potentially vibe to the beat. beat beat -----0.67s---------------------1.33s----- | | | | ------+------ ------+------ input allowed input allowed | | x x enemies moving enemies moving | | | | But now it get's a bit trickier. How can you check for a collision with the player? If you do a basic collision check every frame, you're basically undoing the buffer time we added earlier. If the player wanted to move out of the way of an enemy, they would need to move away from it slightly before the beat actually happens. Likewise, if a player wanted to move to a tile where there's an enemy who'll move away next beat, they would have to move slightly after the beat happens. Ultimately, it would make the whole game feel unfair and broken.

You can solve this problem by doing the "movement" and "damaging" of enemies at different times. For example, you can check for collision once exactly between two beats. So, the enemies are moving to the beat, but damaging to the "off-beat". beat beat -----0.67s---------------------1.33s----- | : | | : | ------+------ : ------+------ input allowed : input allowed | : | x : x enemies moving : enemies moving | x | | enemies damaging | This might look a bit weird, because you can sometimes see the player "glitching" through enemies during the buffer time, but it actually plays way better than with enemies that move and damage at the same time. You could also check for collisions right after the buffer time is over, but this can cause a problem that I didn't think about during the game jam: What happens when the beats are really close together or the difficulty is so low, that the buffer times of two beats overlap?

``` beat beat -----2.00s-------------2.33s----- | | | | ------+-----------------+-------- input allowed input allowed | | x x enemies moving enemies moving | |

``` If you've just set it up so that the enemies are doing damage at the end of the buffer time, you're now hurting the player during the buffer time of the next beat. This might not sound that serious, but it can actually break the game if you remove too much of the buffer time for the next beat. Just play the jam version of our game on the "basically cheating" difficulty. The enemies are damaging so late, it can feel like they have a hitbox lagging behind them. It can make the game a lot harder, because you have to hit every beat just so slightly too late.

So, the most important thing I've learned from making our rhythm game is that you can't just focus on one beat. You've always got to check the timing between the last and next beat.

If you want to try our game, and give us some feedback on how we implemented the rhythm or anything else, you can do so here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/cableman-a-rhythm-game